Posts by Ian Thomas

Re: How decides, whom I trust ?

Someone has to decide for everyone, because site owners need to know that you'll trust their certificate.

If you don't trust a CA then what are you personally going to do about it? All you can do is not use sites that use their certificate (which could be a big pain). If Mozilla don't trust a CA, then they basically put them out of business. That threat alone should encourage CA to be reputable.

Re: Basicss first would be good

I agree that you shouldn't book directly on any of the independent sites, but this article is about the technology company, so from that point of view "The train line" also include the virgin booking website (and others).

The attack you describe causes the user's browser to connect over HTTP, so if you're checking for HTTPS at the appropriate times then you won't be vulnerable. You're not saying HTTPS is broken, you're saying there are ways you can trick users to not use HTTPS.

"the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One consume two to three times more annual energy than the most recent models of their predecessors"

That's hardly a fair comparison, chip technology has moved on but the games they are required to play haven't. For a meaningful comparison you need to look at each console at the same stage in its lifecycle.

Re: ZERO unpatched vulnerabilities.

According to an answer from Microsoft, IE8 on Vista SP2 is supported until April 2017, so they really should be fixing this, at least on Vista. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_xp/lifecycle-internet-explorer-8/2d64f20f-7801-4636-82be-456302181b37

On the other hand, Vista users do have the option of upgrading to IE9. If I were Microsoft I'd be telling people to upgrade to newer versions of IE, rather than turning off important features.

Re: Pah!

You joke, but you (and 95% of other drivers) probably are, at least in terms of financial cost to insurance companies.

Some of the worst drivers will cause huge claims against them, so a large percentage of drivers will have lower claims than the average (i.e. mean). It might not be quite 95%, but I doubt it will be much less.

Re: Understandable

Nice idea, but you need the safe 19yos to subsidise the dangerous ones.

For example, 1000 teenagers insure their cars for a total revenue of £2m. 10% of those make a claim with an average cost of £20k, meaning the insurer breaks even.

If they only charged the accident-free drivers £400 then the total revenue would be £560k and the insurer would be making a huge loss. To break even, they would need to charge the dangerous drivers £16,400. Basically if you had an accident you wouldn't be able to drive again until you were 25 unless you had loads of money.

Even with the current system this is a problem. I know a female driver under 25 who had a slow speed collision with a push chair. The police put the blame firmly with the mother (checking that the road was clear for herself and forgetting that she had a push chair sticking out in front of her), but the mother is seeking compensation for the child's injuries. As such my friend is not currently driving, and has had to turn down jobs because they required you to operate your own car.

Odd logic

Assuming the stats are accurate, I can't see any reason why people would be trading in their old samsung phones for a new iPhone, which is what the article implies.

I suspect what is happening is that loyal Samsung customers are trading up from an old Samsung model to a new one in case the new one gets banned (or because they think all Samsung phones are being banned).

Give it a chance

Most of the people who are likely to download a browser without prompting won't be using IE as their main browser, so it's not surprising that marketshare hasn't rocketed.

Give the corporations a chance to roll it out to their desktops and let Microsoft push out an update for non-technical folks and it'll start seeing some more significant gains.

Oh, by the way, there was a blog post on planet.mozilla.org complaining about exactly this sort of article written about Firefox. His complaint was that they were comparing direct downloads of Firefox 4 with auto-updates of Firefox 3.6.

Blame HTTP and your browser, not Google

Anyone want to point out that it's not google that sends the search terms to the site you visit, but your browser (assuming it's not Chrome of course). Sure, Google could prevent the information from being shared, but the same issue would still exist for every other website out there.

If they are really worried, I'm sure it wouldn't be to hard to extend/modify a browser to never send referrer headers.

What they really mean

HIV paranoid

If you thing Q12 is bad (and it doesn't just apply to gay men, it covers any man who has ever had sex with another man - even if it was just receiving one blow job years ago), then look at Q16. A woman who has had sex with the said one-blow-job-man must wait 12 month before giving blood.

Cannot be directly compared with IE

Remember that Mozilla's bug finding & fixing process is much more open than those of Microsoft and other companies, therefore bugs which might have been quietly fixed in a private organisation become public knowledge with Mozilla.

The good news is that Firefox 1.5.0.2 has no known vulnerabilities rated higher than 'Less Critical' (2/5)